In case it hasn't been mentioned elsewhere the new French upgraded box included blus of 'Le Petit Soldat' and 'Made in USA'. From what I can glean there does not seem to be any subs of any description

I received the box. Not only do those two films not include English subs, but from what I can discern (blu ray menu and hitting the subtitle button on my remote), there are no subs of any kind on any of the films/discs.

Can anyone owning the 2016 Essential Collection set indicate how the subs for that set are accessed? Are they on the disc menu options?

Question re: the transfers. I'm gathering Contempt and Pierrot le Fou are the same ones used as on the 2010 releases?

The rumour says that it's so bad, Lionsgate delayed their release in order to get hold of possibly an unfiltered master.
It will still leave us with the awful new color timing, but at least, if we can get rid of this god-awful DNR and EE, that'd be a good start. It's a shame because the uptick in details is vastly visible, but it's textureless as hell.

nitin wrote:It is apparently derived from the 3D master which was degrained because apparently grain and 3D dont necessarily play that well together.

It is the most surprising part to me, considering how many older movies have been converted to 3D / restored in their 3D-version without having such a heavily filtered aspect.
It's even more surprising that you can find such an example within Cameron's own filmography with Titanic, whose BD 3D-release doesn't exhibit such waxiness at all (and looks instead very lovely, just like its 2D counter-part).

I tend to think that this new T2 restoration simply is screwed up because whatever the reason, 3D or not, somebody at SC thought it would look better with the DNR set up at 11 and compensated by some EE.
I'm quite sure SC have different teams working on different projects, and this clearly isn't the team working on their Vintage Classics UK brand, but rather the one that screwed up Purple Noon and thought the Bergman restorations would be better off DNRed.

James Cameron himself is very keen indeed on degraining, and I suspect he'd have contractually-mandated approval. But I've also heard from a friend in the business that the 4K disc is a disaster - he honestly thought he'd been sent the wrong thing at first.

James Cameron is keen on degraining, but the results so far never looked so poor (far from it), and in the case of Aliens, it was technically reasoned.
In the present case, it just looks like the UHE release of Predator, and I don't believe the 3D reasoning behind could ever justify so strongly filtering the movie.

MichaelB wrote:he honestly thought he'd been sent the wrong thing at first.

No reason to assume otherwise: the mere fact that the French discs are completely English-friendly suggests that one master was created for at least two territories (as is common practice for StudioCanal).

If you don't mind French on the outer packaging there's no reason to wait till March and with these being Studio Canal, they won't be signficantly cheaper than the French discs for a good while yet. Plus, the stylish slim cases of the French discs do save space on the shelves.

Finch wrote:If you don't mind French on the outer packaging there's no reason to wait till March and with these being Studio Canal, they won't be signficantly cheaper than the French discs for a good while yet. Plus, the stylish slim cases of the French discs do save space on the shelves.